Model This: Custom Attribution Modeling in Google Analytics

Ashton Howe /

November 2, 2017

The Google Digital Marketing (GDM) stack is a powerful tool for marketing leaders who need to deeply understand their customer environment. To help you decide which attribution model will give you the best understanding of your data, we’re looking at six ways – from the basic to the beta – that your team can delve deeper into customer insights via attribution modeling.

Custom Attribution Modeling in Google Analytics (Free)

If the baseline attribution options we discussed last time don’t quite fit your needs for modeling against your Google Analytics (Free) data, there’s a supplementary Custom Attribution Modeling functionality that allows you to create and apply your own personalized model instead.

This feature gives you the ability to build a rules-based model from the ground up to assign conversion credit to touchpoints in a way that makes the most sense for your business. Weight different campaigns and engagements in a way that reflects your individualized digital initiatives; deprioritize or filter out touchpoints based on goal; favor certain channels or creatives based on seasonality. For marketers who have already tested the basic options, this is the opportunity to make adjustments based on your unique business needs.

Google’s custom attribution allows you to modify an existing model. New fields available here are a flexible time decay, adjustable lookback window (the default is 30 days – your business may have a shorter or longer customer journey.) In our sample model, we’ve chosen a 7 day half-life and 90 day lookback window in order to capture all of the relevant touchpoints on our conversion path.

Custom modeling with Google Analytics is a step beyond baseline modeling, but there is one limitation to remember: Custom Attribution Modeling in Google Analytics (Free) is click-based only – i.e., the conversion path against which your models can be applied will only include clicks, and will not offer insight into impression value. For that, you’ll need to bring in another piece of the Google Digital Marketing stack – join us next time for display attribution modeling using DoubleClick Campaign Manager.